B.By any measure, founding and then selling two companies would be enough for most people to retire happily. But not for serial entrepreneur Marcia Kilgore. “I really like to do things,” says the Canadian businesswoman.
At 53, she’s on her fifth venture: the Beauty Pie skincare and makeup buyers’ club. She was the founder of the FitFlop footwear company and the Soaper Duper beauty brand; she sold a majority stake in her Bliss Spa skincare brand to LVMH in 1999 at the age of 30, for $30 million; and in 2014, the owners of the drugstore chain Boots acquired its affordable beauty line Soap & Glory.
“I make things that I would like to buy,” says Kilgore. “I think ‘would I buy this?’ and if I wanted to, I would want to do it, and do it better and better. It is a challenge, like solving a puzzle. I don’t know why, I love selling things.”
Kilgore divides her time between Beauty Pie’s London headquarters, her home in Switzerland, and New York, where the company has just opened an office, and admits to feeling “exhausted” after waking up at 1am. She but she shows few signs of tiredness as she sits in a West London studio, talking animatedly about the beauty industry and going over statistics.
Kilgore has been in the industry since his teens, though he “fell” into it after taking a skin care course to try to improve his acne. When she was a student in New York, she started doing facials to pay for his expenses. He opened Bliss Spa in 1996 (clients included Uma Thurman and Madonna) and went on to create a complementary range of products.
CV
Years 53
Family Married with two children aged 18 and 15.
Education School in Saskatchewan, Canada. He studied part-time at New York University (NYU) and the City College of New York, but left without finishing when his Bliss Spa business took off.
Pay “I am a volunteer.” Kilgore says Beauty Pie doesn’t pay him. “I’ve come out of a couple of companies,” she says. “What I am going to do? Take a big salary? It’s a bit of an oxymoron with what I’m doing.”
Last vacations A family trip to Costa Rica: “It was amazing.”
The best advice you’ve ever been given “My costume designer friend Emilio told me that one day he woke up and thought: why not me? Anyone who wants to achieve something can decide: yes, this is what I’m doing.
Biggest career mistake “If I’ve had a hunch that something was wrong and let people talk me into it, they know better. I heard that and had to clean up the mess.”
Phrase that she abuses “Can someone give me access to that document?”
how she relaxes Meditation.
yeshe founded Beauty Pie in 2016 in response to “appalling profit margins” in the industry, a practice he says he was “complicit” in early in his career. Kilgore recalls being told by one of the world’s biggest beauty brands that she had a “cost of goods target for any product of 8%,” which implied huge profit margins.
Described as a club of buyers of luxury beauty products, Beauty Pie sells its own brand of skin care and cosmetics through its website at “factory cost prices” to “members” in the UK and US, who pay an annual fee of £59 (or $59) after one month free trial. Membership allows them to choose from around 400 products, developed in the best cosmetic laboratories.
Beauty Pie, which now has a workforce of 180, says its pricing is transparent because it excludes markups, excess packaging or the cost of in-store promotion. Orders, in signature pink boxes, are shipped from their own warehouses.
Kilgore calls the brand “the Netflix of cosmetics,” but
bristles slightly at the term subscription service. “We don’t send you anything; you ask for it,” she says. With beauty subscription boxes, shoppers don’t get to choose what they receive each month.
Kilgore won’t reveal Beauty Pie’s current membership, though he says it has grown every year since its launch and is up 40% this year alone. There are plans to expand to other countries.
Membership got a boost in the pandemic, encouraging many consumers to turn to e-commerce, but Kilgore says few members have left and describes the brand’s retention rates as “off the charts.”
But in a cost-of-living crisis, will cash-strapped consumers have enough disposable income to shop the Netflix of cosmetics? And will your annual subscription fee, sorry membership, be affected by the exodus that’s hitting Netflix and Amazon Prime as households count their cash? Kilgore says that Beauty Pie has yet to see any change in customer behavior, and experience has taught him that sales don’t necessarily drop during a recession.
“I’m into makeup, skincare, beauty, and shoes. We’ve been through several crises, and people still buy beauty and still buy shoes.”
In fact, the brand’s most expensive product is also its most popular, Kilgore says, naming his £44 facial serum “Youthbomb”.
Beauty Pie made a pre-tax loss of almost £1m in the year to March 31, 2021, on roughly £40m of sales, according to its most recent accounts. Revenue increased 140% over the previous year. Recent sales also suggest the return of the sometimes discredited “lipstick effect”: where spending on small beauty products is said to spike in a recession. Lipsticks have been selling well in recent months, says Kilgore, although this could be due to the launch of several new lines.
The brand has nearly 350,000 followers on Instagram, where Kilgore regularly hosts live skincare Q&As or conducts online polls on new product names.
He also shared the company’s ups and downs, such as the supply chain disruption from the pandemic causing items to temporarily run out of stock, and struggles with a shortage of HGV drivers, clogged ports and shortages of key ingredients. . This makes it “much more of a community,” she says.
Members also seem to like to share their views: Hundreds of them review the brand’s products on its website and have also given the company an average rating of 4.7 stars out of five on Trustpilot.
“She [the Beauty Pie customer] it’s buying something new, something fun that’s a pleasure, because we all need that boost, don’t we? Because right now the news is very bad,” he says.
If I ran out of ideas and thought someone else is in a better position to do this now than I am, then I think I’d consider [leaving]
More generally, consumer demand for these small gifts is increasing, according to recent data. Sales of lip gloss were up 20% in the UK this April compared to the same month in 2019, while sales of all other lip products were up 61% in April compared to before the pandemic, according to the market research company NPD Group.
Kilgore has further expansion in mind: During the pandemic, it conducted two rounds of venture capital funding, the first for any of its businesses. The second round, completed in 2021, raised $100m (£89m). The brand has recently branched out into clothing and beauty appliances, selling pajamas and an electric face brush.
But having left previous businesses, when will Kilgore sell at Beauty Pie?
“If I felt like I’ve brought as much value to it as I could,” she says. “If I ran out of ideas and thought someone else is in a better position to do this now than I am, then I think I would consider it.”
Meanwhile, your next business idea is already in development. All he will say is that he is related to “wellness” and that he is working on making a prototype.
She laughs: “What else am I going to do all day? I would be standing in front of the fridge and that can be dangerous.”
Source: news.google.com